Since the mid-1980s, the West has been “discovering” Chinese cinema. At the same time, more frequent multinational cooperation in Hong Kong, Taiwan and Mainland China has reconfigured the regional landscape of mass media. From pre-production and funding to distribution and exhibition, Chinese cinema crosses the geopolitical boundaries of traditional nationstates. As cinematic interaction between the “three Chinas” increases, the changing mediascape has prompted some to rethink what “China” is, and what the potential meaning of “Chinese cinema” is. Originally introduced by Taiwan- and Hong Kong-based scholars in the early 1990s, the phrase “Chinese-language film” (huayu dianying) has broadened to designate “any film produced in a Chinese-speaking society.” A linguistic description, so to speak, has been used “to unify and supersede older geographical divisions and political discriminations” amid the changing geopolitics and mediascapes in post-Cold War Chinese-speaking societies.

Since the late 1980s and early 1990s, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and subsequently Mainland China have also seen the rise of tongzhi/queer movements and the emergence of tongzhi/queer cultures, studies, and communal consciousness. The term tongzhi first translated the Soviet concept of “comrade” (or cadre), and was initially adopted by the Communist and Nationalist Parties alike. After 1949, tongzhi became the preferred non-hierarchical term to address everyone under the communist regime in People's Republic of China. While it is still used in present-day China for formal introductions, especially in public ceremonies, its popularity as an everyday appellation has waned in China's postsocialist era (from the 1980s onward).

In the meantime, tongzhi was appropriated by queer communities and officially introduced to the public by Hong Kong gay critics Michael Lam (a.k.a. Maike) and Edward Lam (a.k.a. Lin Yihua), at first casually, in some of Michael Lam's writings in around 1985,7 and then formally by Edward Lam for the first Lesbian and Gay Film Festival in Hong Kong in December 1988. Within a few years, tongzhi became the most common term in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and (by the new millennium) metropolitan areas in Mainland China, to refer to those who are characterized by samesex attractions.

This chapter investigates the representation of queer subjects in relation to discourses of filiality, familial-home, and family-state in a Chinese cultural setting. To better capture the nuanced and multilayered meaning of such representation, I propose the idea of a “Chinese queer diasporic imaginary.” It is critical to introduce this concept at the start of this wideranging project: projected on the emerging queer mediascape, this diasporic imaginary juxtaposes queer politics and Chinacentric nationalism, thereby foregrounding the relative significance of the peripheral polities of Taiwan and Hong Kong vis-à-vis Mainland China. To articulate this Chinese queer diasporic imaginary, the notions of filiality and familial-home must also be interrogated, for they embody the patriarchal discourse so fundamental to Chinese cultural and intellectual history. The articulation of the Chinese queer diasporic imaginary, then, lays the foundation for my investigation of the queer-inflected camp aesthetic in Chapter 4; it also embodies a strand of Chinese queer representation equal in importance to that of Chinese opera (this will be more fully addressed in Chapters 2 and 6). But first: what is diaspora? On what grounds is the notion of diaspora relevant to queerness? And in what sense does the suturing of queerness to diaspora help account for the representation of queer subjects in a Chinese cultural context?

The previous chapter zooms in on the PRC, tracing the history of Yueju through the uses of qing and film melodrama, bringing out a queer discourse on Chinese opera that, defined against the state ideology of socialism, becomes crucial to the region's emerging mediascape. This chapter will focus on Hong Kong and it social economy, which is key to the diffusion of mass camp impulse and particularly gender parody, a characteristic of Hong Kong cinema from the 1970s onward. During the 1950s and 1960s, Cantonese-language cinema and Mandarin-language cinema existed in Hong Kong mostly as two separate systems, each constituted by different modes of production and consumption. While Cantonese cinema was epitomized by fast turnaround, low-budget, mostly independent productions, from the mid-1950s Mandarin cinema was generally geared toward bigger budgets and higher production values, the standards of major film studios such as Shaw Brothers (originally Shaws) and MP & GI (later renamed Cathay). While Cantonese cinema reached an annual output of over two hundred films in the early 1960s, Mandarin cinema maintained an annual average of around forty until the late 1960s, when its output conspicuously increased to over sixty (nearly one hundred by the early 1970s). With this rapid expansion of Mandarin cinema, however, came the drastic decline of Cantonese cinema, whose output dropped to nil in 1972.

As we saw in the previous chapter, the Chinese New Documentary Movement of the 1990s distanced itself from official discourses, choosing instead to document the lives of ordinary people, especially those on the margins of society (bianyuan ren). This thematic choice lent itself to subjects such as the lives of marginalized artists, migrant workers, miners, Tibetans, the disabled, the elderly, the poor, and those who identify as queer. While lesbian subjects have been the focus of several films since 2001 (see Chapter 5), the lives of female impersonators and transgender individuals have also been filmed by independent documentary filmmakers. Miss Jin Xing (Zhang Yuan, 2000) follows the transgender dancer of the same name, and Snake Boy (Michelle Chen and Li Xiao, 2001) takes as its subject male vocalist Coco Zhao, whose incredible stage performance is characterized by “drag” on a sonic level. A stream of documentaries about transgender people followed, including Tang Tang (Zhang Hanzi 2004), Mei Mei (Gao Tian 2005), Beautiful Men (Du Haibin, 2005), Madame (Qiu Jiongjiong, 2010), Be A Woman (Fan Popo, 2011), and the first short about a subject undergoing FTM gender reassignment, Brother (Yao Yao, 2013).

This chapter focuses on Tang Tang and Mei Mei in order to shed light on China's transgender documentary scene. Although each of the two documentaries centers around a female impersonator, they approach their subjects in distinct ways.

In the previous chapter I mapped out the dissemination of mass camp impulse in Hong Kong from the 1960s, and its discursive formation from the late 1970s. I pointed out that while camp in Hong Kong has been mainly understood as a penchant for excessive stylizations and the overly conventionalized, denotations of gender parody – alongside their homosexual connotations – somehow did not constitute a salient dimension of that local camp discourse in its early stage. A notable change, however, took place during the second half of the 1980s, when Chow Yun-fat's star vehicle The Eighth Happiness (1988) played a crucial part in bringing into public awareness a camp appreciation accentuated by gender bending and gender parody. Since the late 1980s, Hong Kong people would often simply use the English word “camp” to describe effeminate men with strong homosexual overtones.

Responding to this tendency to equate sissies and gay men through camp, Xiaomingxiong (a.k.a. Samshasha, 1954-2006), a Hong Kong-based cultural critic and pioneering gay historian, published four essays in late 1988 in his column on gay film culture (“xiong ying ji”) in the popular Film Biweekly (Dianying shuang zhoukan). His essays compounded the issue of camp in a number of ways. First, he discussed the historical figure Qu Yuan (338-278 BC), a revered official and poet best known for his Li sao (Encountering Sorrow), an epic written before his suicide that exhorts the king to distance himself from those maneuvering deviously in his court.